Poet’s Commute

Morning coffee, same café where I once closed
the Midwest expansion.

My old team holds the corner table—
quarterly planning, someone drawing matrices on napkins.

I sit two tables over, notebook open
to a half-finished villanelle about Lake Michigan ice.

Paul Khan from Accounting passes without recognition.

Good.

The uniform of retirement: canvas jacket, older jeans,
invisible to the suited world.

“Remember when Charles ran these meetings?” someone says.
Laughter. “Could forecast revenue like reading weather.”

They mean it kindly.

Between stanzas, I catch their jargon—
leveraging synergies, moving the needle.

Once I spoke fluent corporate.

Now those words feel foreign
as Virgil’s hexameters felt at fourteen,
before they became home.

My phone buzzes: acceptance from Kyoto Journal.

They’ll publish “Mono no Aware in the Quarterly Report”—
my meditation on finding beauty in fiscal year endings.

Paul Khan’s team debates burn rates.

I return to my villanelle.

Saturday, driving home, I detour past the old office.

Two-story manufacturing wedged among post-war houses,
their peaked roofs and picture windows
from when suburbs meant something hopeful.

My corner office remains—
cherry wood furniture,
the desk where I signed acquisitions, terminations, celebrations.

They’ve moved operations but left my office like a diorama:
“Middle Manager, circa 2017.”

Even the computer waits for passwords I’ve forgotten.

At my old desk: Horace bookmarks Bashō,
spreadsheets reborn as scanning patterns.

The boy who loved Latin declensions
became the man who leveraged assets.

Both were practice for this—
the daily commute between what was and what is.

III

Evenings, I translate Horace for pleasure,
no deadline but death’s.

“Integer vitae,” I write, then cross it out.
Try again: “Whole in life”—
but wholeness eludes English.

Certain truths live only in inflection.

My wife reads in the next room.

Forty years ago I brought her spreadsheets to proofread.
Now she’s first reader for attempts at haiku,
counts my syllables, catches where I’ve forced the seasonal word.

“This one,” she says, “feels like a meeting
that could have been an email.”

We both laugh.

She’s right.

Some mornings I wake thinking it’s Monday,
there’s a report due, the Singapore office needs guidance.

Then I remember: the only deadline is the one I set—
submit to Prairie Schooner by month’s end,
finish the Catullus translation before summer.

I study silences now.

I optimize the pause between stanzas,
test the weight-bearing capacity of a line break.

Different language, same discipline.

Different suit, same need to bridge
the distance between speaker and listener,
the self who was and the self becoming.